By It seems like the closer we get to the CW’s Crisis on Infinite Earths event, the more regret I feel that I just don’t care about it. I’ve never followed any of the CW DC shows even though DC is my bread and butter. As much as I may make fun and criticize the company’s decisions, I’m still a fan because I love their characters that much. So when it was announced last year that DC would be doing an adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the event comic that started it all, even I took interest in it. I’ll be tuning in out of principle, especially given how the event will be a who’s who of talent that has worked with the company over the past two decades.
Between including Brandon Routh’s Superman and bringing back the freaking Huntress from the 2002 Birds of Prey series, it was only a matter of time until they brought in a Batman. When it was announced that Kevin Conroy would be reprising his role as Batman, people were pretty pumped, but then they realized that this would be the first time he’s portraying the character in live-action. Yes, the voice of Batman, for the better part of a generation, will finally have a body to project his smooth voice and we now know what he’ll look like.
The version of Batman that Conroy will be playing is a version from the 1996 4-issue miniseries Kingdom Come. The story centers on Superman coming out of retirement to educate the next generation of heroes, whether they’re willing to learn from him or not. In it, Batman serves is fairly antagonistic towards Superman’s plan to the point where he and a small faction of heroes actually team up with Lex Luthor to stop Superman’s educational gulag (yes, he builds a gulag.) It’s probably one of the best comics ever made and I highly recommend it to any DC Comics fan in general. Getting back to the point, Kingdom Come’s Batman can’t function without an exoskeleton suit and has turned Gotham into a borderline police state, constantly under surveillance by his army of bat-bots.
It’s interesting seeing Conroy’s Batman in live-action since the actor was all nerves when I caught up with him at NYCC. He said that it was the first time in over twenty years he took on a role where he wasn’t stuck in a voice booth. He said that he was both excited and nervous to finally be in front of the camera again, with his enthusiasm for the role being easy to see. He also told me that he was coming to kill the critics, so now I can officially say that Batman is coming to kill me at some point in the near future. Eh, worse ways to die!
Crisis on Infinite Earths will begin December 8, 2019 and will run for five episodes exclusively on the CW.
